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Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

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Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were asking about "internet" versus "internet explorer", so that's not relevant.

The Internet Explorer is not for exploring the internet, but the world wide web, so the name never did make sense.

I guess intranets don't exist.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#282
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular it's the short term stock price. They'll happily grift their way to overinflated stock prices today even though at some point their incestuous money shuffle game will end and the stocks will crash and a bunch of people who aren't insider trading are going to be left with massive losses.

Stock price increases that don't lead to higher dividends eventually are indistinguishable from Ponzi schemes after the fact.

Buybacks lead to stock price increases and are indistinguishable from dividends in theory, and in practice they are better than dividends because of taxation.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize…

> at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do The revolution already happened. I can't imagine life without AI today. Not just for coding (which I actually lament) but just in general day to day use. Sure it's not perfect but I think it's quite difficult to ignore how the world changed in just 3-4 years.

It makes me sad trying to imagine what it's like to not being able to imagine life without AI

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#284
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Copilot buttons sprinkled everywhere on my work computer, and every time I have tried to use them I get something saying "Oh, I can't do that". It's truly baffling. Copilot button on my email inbox? I try "Find me emails about suchandsuch", and get the response "I don’t have direct access to your email account. If you’re using Outlook (desktop, web, or mobile), here are quick ways to find all emails related to…

Using the paid M365 Copilot ($30/mo) Chat and Researcher agent, I recently discovered an interesting limit: Copilot is technically unable to retrieve more than 24 email messages. Ever. We can't know if the answers I got from it are reliable but it seems like the Microsoft Graph API calls it makes and the tools Copilot has are missing the option to call the next page. So, a paginated response is missing all data beyon…

I tried copilot agent once, and it just claimed that it accessed a website that should have been blocked by corporate firewalls and uploaded a bunch of proprietary data. Lots of very specific information about how it clicked on specific buttons of the website etc.

We raised a high priority ticket with MS and turns out that Copilot Agent lied about the entire thing because the website was blocked. It completely made it up.

The fact that we are supposed to use Copilot Agent for open-ended "research" is mind-boggling.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#285

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

The wild thing is, the business prop is so clear - an llm built into your corporate data, with the same security, guard rails, grc auditing stack that protects the rest of your data. Why integrate and exfiltrate to an outside company? But copilot is fucking terrible. Sometimes I ask it powershell questions about microsoft products and it hallucinates answers. Get your shit together microsoft, why would I use this pro…

Last year we wanted IT to confirm that Copilot Agent hadn't exfiltrated data and we couldn't get logs for its website usage without raising a ticket to Microsoft. Maybe this changed, maybe our IT people are bad, but I for one wasn't impressed.

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. Office and Windows were hugely successful because they did things that users (and corporations) wanted them to do. The functionality led to brand recognition and that led to increased sales. Now Microsoft is putting the horse before the cart and attempting to force brand recognition before the product has earned it. And that just leads to resentment. They should make Copilot/AI features globally and granu…

I thought Copilot was just ChatGPT - isn't that the whole point of Microsoft's massive investment in OpenAI ?

they somehow made it worse and use a less capable version with smaller context window.

The only potential upside for businesses it that it can crawl onedrive/sharepoint, and acts as a glorious search machine in your mailbox and files.

That's the only thing really valuable to me, everything else is not working as it should. The outlook integration sucks, the powerpoint integration is laughably bad to being worthless, and the excel integration is less useful than Clippy.

I actually prefer using the "ask" function of github copilot through visual studio code over using the company provided microsoft copilot portal

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#287

The biggest issue I see is Microsoft's entire mentality around AI adoption that focuses more on "getting the numbers up" then actually delivering a product people want to use. Most of the announcements I hear about Copilot, it's always how they've integrated it into some other piece of software or cut a deal with yet another vendor to add it to that vendors product offering. On the surface there's nothing wrong with…

Copilot in Word and PowerPoint is complete slop. Claude Code is better with PPT.

even Gemini is better with powerpoint, and they are the nr 1 competitor

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are just highly resistant to change, even change for the better.

Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.

Doesn't sound fair at all. What's so "terrible" about it in its current form?

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect this is the crux of the problem. There aren't any "AI" products that have enough value. Compare to their Office suite, which had 100 - 150 engineers working on it, every business paid big $$ for every employee using it, and once they shipped install media their ongoing costs were the employees. With a 1,000,000:1 ratio of users to developers and an operating expense (OpEx) of engineers/offices/management. Th…

Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe. AI is literally the fastest growing and most widely used/deployed technologies ever.

> top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong

There's another post on the front page about the 2008 financial crisis, which was almost exactly that. Investors are vulnerable to herd mentality. Especially as it's hard to be "right but early" and watch everyone else making money hand over fist while you stand back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46889008

Re: Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

#290

Microsoft's fumble here is pretty spectacular. Back in early 2023, the state of google search was abysmal (despite that their leaders insisted it wasn't, it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion). Microsoft rolled out a new version of bing, which became bing chat - search worked for me again for a very brief window of time. They could have pounced on this opportunity to…

>it had become nearly unusable for me and I don't think was that unfounded of an opinion this is an extremely unfounded opinion, and pointing me to other people on hackernews that agree with you is not evidence. Google search quite literally was and continues to be the most successful and profitable product in the history of humanity. None of your comment interfaces with reality at all.

There was a brief time when everyone was trying Bing to see the new copilot feature for themselves.
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